


touching me, touching you

by moongirls



Series: our coming of age has come and gone [1]
Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: American Player (Fallen London), BUT i want him to be my weird mysterious father figure anyway, Bisexuality, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Genderfluid Character, Indian Player (Fallen London), M/M, Original Character-centric, implicit critique of american imperialism, listen i understand that the veteran privy counsellor is a weird mysterious old man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:08:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24871306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moongirls/pseuds/moongirls
Summary: Nothing ever changes in the Neath. The courtiers court ears, the pickpockets pick pockets, and the everlasting night lasts on.You came to the Neath to chase secrets and adventures, discover new ways of being.But you are no longer the lovely girl who sailed across the Atlantic in search of mystery. You are not lovely anymore — entrancing, perhaps, or hypnotic.Fascinatingmight be an appropriate term. And you are not a girl anymore. Not really. Or not always, perhaps.
Relationships: Player (Fallen London) & The Veteran Privy Counsellor (Fallen London), Player (Fallen London)/The Struggling Artist (Fallen London), Player (Fallen London)/The Struggling Artist's Model (Fallen London)
Series: our coming of age has come and gone [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1934047
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	touching me, touching you

**Author's Note:**

> this is purely a character study writing exercise i wrote to flex my writing muscles/practice writing in "half-scene"/flesh out the backstory of my player character (who is basically a self-insert with a backstory). however, i ended up being fairly proud of the style/character so i'm Posting anyway.
> 
> the title is of course from _sweet caroline_ by neil diamond.

Nothing ever changes in the Neath. The courtiers court ears, the pickpockets pick pockets, and the everlasting night lasts on.

You came to the Neath to chase secrets and adventures, discover new ways of being.

But you are no longer the lovely girl who sailed across the Atlantic in search of mystery. You are not lovely anymore — entrancing, perhaps, or hypnotic. _Fascinating_ might be an appropriate term. And you are not a girl anymore. Not really. Or not always, perhaps.

You wear waistcoats now, and Exceptional Hats. You seek membership to gentleman’s clubs and you romance young women. In the Neath, nothing has meaning. There is no true marker of womanhood or manly prowess. In the Neath, you simply _are._

But if you returned to the true sky, you would be a gentleman these days. And sometimes a lady, if the mood struck you. And you would not be welcome in polite company, which is increasingly okay with you.

Polite company never did much of anything for you anyway. 

* * *

The boarding-school parlors and charity balls, the endless whispers and wonderments — a lifetime of being _exotic,_ a foreigner in your own country — it was a childhood, of sorts. But you could do without an adulthood in the same vein. So you scoured your library for undiscovered territories that you could seek out — South American deserts and islands in the Pacific. But people were already there, native peoples, living their lives on the land they loved. People were already there. White settlers with guns and a chilling superiority in their smiles, marching on in service of the white man’s progress, coming to those _untouched lands_ tomorrow or next week or next year.

You knew progress as well as anyone else, you suppose. Your parents’ home caught in its cogs, crunched beneath its boots. India, jewel-bright and spice-aired. That’s how you imagined it — that’s how the books describe it. You wouldn’t know, never having been there yourself. Your parents hitched a ride on the future-machine, made a moderate fortune on those glimmering diamonds. Somewhere in all the dust, other brown people were bleeding and coughing and slaving and dying for your pretty necklaces and froth-white lace. Your parents said not to worry about it — the Americans certainly didn’t.

And you were — _are_ — an American, as much as anyone can be. Loudmouthed, brash, fond of scandals. Looking for adventure, a frontier to conquer. Preferably one that could be conquered without hurting anyone. Too weak-willed for that, but it’s alright — genocidal tendencies are preferred in young men. Ladies can do without.

But there were no new lands to discover, no mysteries to be found, no name to make or reputation to forge. You were left with the prospect of a lifetime as the only daughter of new-money foreigners, desired and ridiculed in New York society.

You did not want to live a life like this — had no idea what you _did_ want, of course, but this much, at least, was clear.

So you packed a bag — the first one you’d ever packed without a maid’s help — and paid for passage to the Continent. 

* * *

On the deck of the ship, the salt wind whipping through your hair, the gleam in your eyes as they landed upon the sailors. The one you picked out was named Joseph, a plain name for a plain man. He had a rough bark of a laugh and touched you so gently with his work-hardened hands. Smiled at you like he had never seen your like before, though there must have been scores of rich girls flirting with him before. You had never seen his like either; no man had wanted you in New York, not with your nut-brown skin or strong nose. But Joseph whispered your name against the bare skin of your shoulder; you sighed his into his ear.

And as soon as it began, your journey was over. Joseph kissed you on the docks before he left, his brawny strength enveloping you.

“Would you wait for me?” His lips brushed your earlobe as he spoke.

Your throat seized and your chest ached. You clutched at him and did not answer.

He kissed you again, and sighed as though he’d known your answer before he’d asked.

“If I stayed with you, would you have me?”

This, at least, you could do.

“If you stayed, I’d never leave your side,” you said, and pulled back to stare into his eyes. “But you won’t stay.”

He smiled at that, and kissed you for the last time.

“You’ll break more important hearts than mine, love,” he whispered like a secret, and you couldn’t help the grin that tugged at your lips as he set you free. 

Then he turned and did not look back. You turned, too, and went out to find somewhere to stay.

* * *

Instead, you found Malcolm, and kept him for a time. Then came Liam in Dublin and Louis in Nice. Alexei in Paris — you were two foreigners stumbling together, reeking of liquor, through the City of Love.

Helene in Brussels — she wouldn’t tell you where she was from, but she spoke impeccable French and German, and truly heinous Dutch. She laughed at your inexperience with women and sighed that she loved you when she came. You didn’t love her, but she was new and you loved novelty, so you whispered it back anyway and it didn’t feel like a complete lie.

Katya in Prague and Ivan in Warsaw. You met Thomas from the hotel in Berlin again in Vienna and he invited you to travel with him to Moscow. You turned him down to go to Denmark with Henrik and Astrid; they laughed at your jokes and loved you like something precious, which was delightful until you realized that _precious_ was their way of saying _rare,_ like a tiger-skin rug or one of your family’s diamonds.

Europe was your playground, a lonely, jam-packed carousel of spirits and dancing and poetry and lovers. You bought train tickets and passage on ships with your parents’ money, mostly. On rare occasions, you worked up the nerve to sit down and write poems and stories, and on even rarer ones, publishers paid for them. You invariably blew that money the same night, celebrating the heady flattery of success with your latest party of miscreants and lonely souls.

And as you spun wildly through the cities of Europe (but never journeying to Asia, never risking the contact with people who shared your skin), you caught the threads of rumor — the City that Was and that Fell. Stories, falsehoods upon fictions. 

A _thing_ living in the subterranean seas. Living golems, some complete, some brutally unfinished. A card game with a prize that could not be described.

“Everything can be described if you’re skilled enough,” you said, lazy with indifference. “Tell me this fantastical prize.”

“The prize is _everything,_ ” said Charles (called Charlie by his friends, an English noble bastard, a terribly selfish lover and a terribly skilled one at the same time). “Your heart’s greatest desire. It’s called the Marvellous.”

“Which is marvelous? The game or the prize?”

Charles rolled his eyes, and kissed you soundly. When you left his rat-hole apartment that night, you went straight to the library, sex-sweaty and fever-eyed, and devoured everything you could find about the fallen city, the Traitor Empress, the Marvellous itself. You still didn’t know what you wanted, but —

That was a problem for later.

* * *

So you lied and flirted and swindled and stole your way to the Neath. The dark and fetid air in your nose, sticking in your throat, sitting heavy in your lungs. A hungry girl with desire in her eyes, ready to swallow everything London had to offer. The honey-dens and Rubbery Men, the poets and zailors, the Arbor-dreams and rat-menaces. Novelty, everywhere your eye fell. It was as much like love as you’d ever felt.

You spun through London as you’d done through Europe, apprenticing to a Honey-Addled Detective until he grew too unintelligible for your tastes and you left him too. Befriending a Bohemian Sculptress and allowing her to introduce you to everyone who _mattered,_ at least in her small circles. And you took lovers again, but these ones had no names and were wickeder and lovelier than any on the surface.

A Struggling Artist, who painted you in his bedroom as Eleanor had on the rocky Scottish cliffs. He dressed you in his pigment-stained shirts and kissed his way up your thighs, said you made a handsome and wild gentleman, his scruffy chin scraping you raw. He introduced you to his Artist’s Model, though he surely didn’t expect you’d leave him for her. No shame in two women going together, nor in the casual discarding of the Artist. A debauched and careless city welcomed you in style.

You eventually left the Struggling Artist’s Model for a Honey-Sipping pair, a Heiress and a Jewel-Thief. From there, you seduced and dallied your way through the city. Still, you frequently run into the Artist and his Model these days, as they rise through the Bohemian chaff alongside you. Years of life in London, and still you cannot escape the same people. You take them back, sometimes, and leave them again. Sometimes, they leave you. It’s nothing new. 

The Struggling Artist becomes a Rising Artist, and still he sketches you in his clothes, though your manliness is no longer a novelty. He begs you for jade, and you oblige, usually — some kind of gratitude for his tutelage in bohemian masculinity, though he surely doesn’t realize. The Artist’s Model takes lovers as you do, and sometimes you exchange them. You send each other letters, formal and fond, and pretend that your affairs make any sort of sense at all.

You practice deceit and trickery, learn the principles of dueling, smuggling, and the more refined methods of murder. You liaise with rubbery scoundrels and bandaged rakes, and raise secret toasts to the Gracious Widow. In the darkest corners of Wolfstack Docks, you exercise the forms of the Tomb-Colonies against Feducci, and sometimes, you don’t die.

You buy your way into a position as a Journalist, red notebook in hand and an eager nose to the ground. No trails to sniff out here, or at least nothing new. Everyone knows everything in London, or at least, everything can be found out. You break a story, or so you think — apparently, a new apprentice of the Honey-Addled Detective sniffed it out first and sent the rumors through the city first. No matter. You’ll be an Author instead, writing original works as you did on your first Tour.

One short story, acceptable. Another one, compelling. Thrilling, then Extraordinary, then Masterful, then Celebrated. “What would it take to be Classic?” you wonder.

* * *

The Struggling Artist — no, he’s Rising now, and has been for years — crawls back to you. You pay him off, and send him on his way without any fun. He’s boring, now.

* * *

You claw your way into the Empress’s Court, pretending you’ve no connections with Revolutionaries or scandalous Bohemians. (Your history would show that you’ve always disliked monarchs and society leaders, even in New York — your city, once upon a time, the center of your world, eclipsed now by the stifling and dim being that is Bazaarine London.)

A chance to be Imperial Artist-in-Residence, though — that is _new._ Not like your lovers in Spite and Veilgarden, not like the tiresome madness of the Topsy King, not like the Wolfstack strikes and Madame Shoshana’s uniform fortunes. This could be something big, something to replace the hole that rotted in your spirit when the search for the Marvellous proved too tedious, too expensive, too difficult for a diamond-heir with a passion for debauchery. You still hadn't known what you wanted, so you gave up, as heirs to fortunes so often do.

But this could be an exceptional achievement, an adventure, perhaps. And you are remembering what it feels like to _want._

The Veteran Privy Counsellor sees the way your eyes skip over the ladies’ Moon-Pearl dresses and the antique furniture, how they linger on the poets and dramatists of the court, tallying up strengths and evaluating weaknesses. He does the same to you, and something that he sees moves his hand. You are his winning racehorse.

“You could be the Imperial Artist-in-Residence,” he whispers in the silent palace. _I know,_ you think. _I know what I can be._

“I will lead you,” he says, and for once in your life, you consent to be led. You can smell the victory.

A Tragic Romance and an Epic Poetic Cycle. You have a flair for the melodramatic and overwrought, but London loves you all the more for it. Heaving bosoms and sheer nightdresses abound, and you take full advantage with little shame. Your next works make copious mentions of tight men’s trousers and expound upon the virtues of frequent riding among young men. You take advantage of that too.

The Veteran Privy Counsellor gives you freedom even as he leads you, and you love him for that, in your own fashion. You stage a ballet to thank him for it, though your own touches in the costuming department see you packed off to the Tomb-Colonies again.

You return and continue churning out plays and poems and songs and symphonies. Your novels are all the rage right now, though the courtiers hide them behind other books. The Veteran Privy Counsellor tells you he is proud of your work, and you smirk at him, grin past the sudden tightness in your throat. Some part of you wants to throw your arms around him, wants to curl up at his side like a child, wants to forget that you are kindred souls only in your twin loves of power and art.

Instead, you seduce a Barbed Wit and an Acclaimed Beauty and fuck them on the Empress’ Throne itself. Symbolic, perhaps. Another stint in the Tomb-Colonies, regardless.

* * *

The Veteran Privy Counsellor welcomes you back with a twinkle in his eye and tells you that you must expel yourself from court.

“And I suppose afterward I ought to kill myself too,” you remark, and he smiles as though you are a precocious child, or perhaps a pet.

“You _will_ be the Artist-in-Residence,” he says, and you try your very best to believe him. It does not quite work.

* * *

The Artist’s Model stops by to request help dispatching another lover. You haven’t seen her in a while — she looks precisely the same, though perhaps there is a new smugness about her smile. You trace your lips down her breasts, down her stomach, and lower still as she offers you unsolicited advice — she doesn’t like your preoccupation with the Imperial Residency, doesn’t like that you don’t leave the Shuttered Palace anymore, doesn’t like your affairs with the Beauty and the Wit or your association with the Privy Counsellor.

“What, have you decided to be jealous now, after years of sense?” you ask, laughing.

“Hardly,” she sniffs. “But I _like_ having you around, and all these intrigues will see you with a permanent post across the Unterzee.”

“Would you miss me?” Your breath catches in your throat even as you ask it.

“I said I liked having you around, did I not?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“No, it’s not,” she says, and kisses you more gently than she has in years. “I would write to you. I wouldn’t miss you.”

* * *

You stage the damn opera, a horrific and heavyweight epic mocking the Empress. The courtiers shield their eyes, as if they hope that blindness will save them from being tainted by your audacity. The Traitor Empress splutters, red-faced and undignified with fury. When you leave London, you do so wearing the smirk you learned in New York salons, practiced in Parisian bars, and perfected in the honey-dens of Veilgarden. 

The Veteran Privy Counsellor scurries to catch you at the docks and tells you that he’ll secure you a position while the scandal dies down. You remember how the Empress shrieked at the sight of something new, a work the like of which had never before graced her stolid and mouldering Court — how your heart kicked in your chest at these strange and wonderful reactions to your work.

“Trust me,” the Privy Counsellor says, his jowls quivering with pride in you. “I’ll take care of you.”

“I’ll take care of myself,” you say, then pause. “But I’ll trust you to help.”

He balks at the mortifying sincerity of your words, then nods with a tenuous and gentle smile.

“You did well,” he says, and perhaps that is his own way of expressing sentiment. "I could not be more proud."


End file.
